Storybench from Northeastern University's School of Journalism

Latest Articles

How to animate a map in Adobe After Effects

Deforestation and sea level rise are two very important parts of environmental news. Having recently worked on a piece tackling deforestation, I wanted to create a map that showed Amazon rainforest loss over time. This tutorial works with […]

February 20, 2019February 20, 2019 Fabiana Echeverria How to

How The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported stories of ‘growing up through the cracks’

How to build a heatmap in Python

What do freelance writers make?

Horserace or issues? Tracking the media’s coverage of the 2020 election

Breaking news!: We are unveiling findings from our national study on reinventing local TV News

“There is only so much data can tell us”

Behind the scenes

How The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported stories of ‘growing up through the cracks’

February 19, 2019February 19, 2019 Charlie Wolfson Behind the scenes, Interviews

How The Pudding visualized the structure of Ali Wong’s stand-up comedy

Social media engagement tips from Tidal’s Mikaela Allen

How we plotted 17,000 data points in 3D to explore police use of force in New Jersey

Insights

What do freelance writers make?

February 13, 2019February 13, 2019 Daniel Hentz Insights

Horserace or issues? Tracking the media’s coverage of the 2020 election

“There is only so much data can tell us”

Six fascinating projects from the 2019 Computation + Journalism Symposium in Miami

Tutorials

How to animate a map in Adobe After Effects

February 20, 2019February 20, 2019 Fabiana Echeverria How to

How to build a heatmap in Python

Scraping HTML tables and downloading files with R

How to map point data and polygon shapefiles in R

How to install R on a Jupyter notebook

How to download song lyrics from Genius using Python

How to get Twitter data with rtweet in R

Northeastern

Horserace or issues? Tracking the media’s coverage of the 2020 election

February 13, 2019February 15, 2019 Alexander Frandsen Insights, Northeastern

“How can newspapers create value in this new digital environment?”

Six fascinating projects from the 2019 Computation + Journalism Symposium in Miami

“Every piece of paper has valuable information”

Roundups

Six fascinating projects from the 2019 Computation + Journalism Symposium in Miami

February 6, 2019February 6, 2019 Gibby Free Insights, Northeastern, Roundups

Five Venezuelans that are explaining the situation unfolding in my country

Five Latin American media platforms experimenting with illustrated news

A roundup of visualizations of discrimination in the tech industry

Longform

The future of machine learning in journalism

Kevin Wall, a visual journalist at The Boston Globe, is just beginning to use machine learning in his reporting. But the large amounts of data he needs to leverage this kind of artificial intelligence isn’t always easy to […]

January 2, 2019January 7, 2019 Floris Wu Insights, Longform

Journalists improve coverage of memes with careful reporting

How the Palm Beach Post unearthed an opioid conspiracy with roots in Florida

Social media and news: The dilemma of our time

How The Washington Post designs its Snapchat stories

Making the interactive documentary “Oil to Die For”

The rise of documentary video games that use journalism to tell stories

Join us at Northeastern!

Want to write for Storybench and probe the frontiers of media innovation? Apply for one of our graduate programs at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

Rolling admissions, no GREs required and financial aid available. Email here.

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Over the next two years we’ll be surveying the media’s coverage of the candidates and the issues. Follow along here.

Pizza, Press & Politics is our weekly speaker series at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. Watch interviews with David Filipov, Mike Workman, Jenn Smith, Martha Durkee-Neuman, Susan Labandibar, John Ward, Marc Fortier, Carol Gregory, Ling-Mei Wong and Elana Gordon.

The Reinventing Local TV News Project, from Northeastern’s School of Journalism, is analyzing the formats and practices of local news stations, and suggesting new ways of telling stories that can better engage diverse audiences. Read our inaugural post here.

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Collaborative, Open, Mobile

Over the last three years, Storybench has interviewed 72 data journalists, web developers, interactive graphics editors, and project managers from around the world to provide an “under the hood” look at the ingredients and best practices that go into today’s most compelling digital storytelling projects.

They boil down to three key areas of emphasis: 1) highly networked, team-based collaboration; 2) an ethos of open-source sharing, both within and between newsrooms; 3) and mobile-driven story presentation. Read our paper here.

What is Storybench?

Storybench takes an “under the hood” look at the latest in digital storytelling, from data viz and investigative journalism to VR and digital humanities. In addition to in-depth interviews with industry practitioners, we offer hands-on tutorials that can be “downloaded” right into the classroom or newsroom.

Want to contribute to Storybench? Pitch us or join us for a graduate degree in the Media Innovation program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.